1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to online marketing and, more particularly, to an automated system and method for enabling sales- and service-oriented organizations to influence a position on a search result listing generated by an Internet search engine for a specified set of search terms that is highly relevant to the goods and services that said organizations offer in the marketplace.
2. Description of the Background
A variety of major search engines exist to index and search the information available on the internet so that users can locate information of interest. These major search engines such as Google®, Yahoo®, etc., enable consumers to search the Internet for a listing of web sites based on a specific topic, product, or service of interest. The resulting listing is typically ranked by relevance, and the consumer tends to pay more attention to the higher-ranked results. When marketers invest in a web site, they do so in expectation that potential customers will find it high up in search results.
All major search engines rely on complex, mathematical algorithms that search a database containing a keyword index of the internet. All major search engines select and rank web pages from the index based on multiple criteria such as keyword density and keyword location. The search engines employ a rule-based decision process, with queries such as: is there an exact search phrase match? How many times does a page contain your search words? Do the words appear in the title, in the URL, directly adjacent? Does the page include synonyms of these words? Is this page from a quality web site? A page rank is then formed by combining together all these and many additional proprietary factors for each web page that the search engine found in its index, and the prioritized listing of search results is returned to the consumer.
These search engines often consider invisible text, or “meta tags”, in their analysis. Consequently, website owners and third party promoters author their websites and insert meta tags containing popular search terms solely to influence search result ranking. All major search engine proprietors win respect with unbiased highly relevant search results, and so go to great efforts not to allow their rankings manipulated by marketers. They build screening logic into their search engines to detect and ignore covert tactics intended only to influence search result ranking. Online marketers find new covert strategies to avoid detection, and the result is a game of cat-and-mouse.
A more reliable approach to influencing priority in a listing of search results returned by an Internet search engine is to create a true online representation of organizational activities by extracting and publishing information stored in books of business to generate a dynamic stream of relevant web pages that are specifically formatted to help search engines—and therefore users—quickly discover and easily understand highly relevant content they produce. This makes it easier for search engines to index and understand web page content, which in turn helps search engines determine if a web page is a relevant search result to display for a particular search query. While this might seem common-sense, proper and consistent formatting of extracted information that is aligned with search engine optimization best practices is essential.
For example, each time that an auto repair facility solves a complex problem with a customer's vehicle they optimally would describe both problem and solution on their website so that when subsequent consumers experiencing the problem type in relevant key words, the facility is ranked highest. This, of course, takes a continual effort to document each repair and use it to create a web page, over time resulting in a dynamic stream of relevant web pages all including highly specialized formatting to make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand content of these web pages. Exceptionally few repair facilities would have time and the know-how to do this right. Compounding the issue, there are only two categories of web site promoters to help them: 1) budget-priced, offering generic content that is manually produced by limited editorial staffs and shared across great many like-clients; and 2) premium-priced, offering highly customized content that is also manually produced by limited editorial staffs, but exclusive to a particular client, which is cost-prohibitive to scale up.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for automatically generating continuous relevant web content to showcase actual services provided, or products sold, in order to positively influence ranking in a listing of search results algorithmically returned by major Internet search engines in response to a key phrase query that is relevant to services or products that a user provides.